My View

There – I said it : I am RICH and here I show off my wealth:

In Leh with my new friends-for-life

In a remote village in Himalayas with my Dard Aryan hostess and her village folk

In Arunachal with a beautiful Apatani Woman

In Sikkim, totally enamoured by the little Lama

When I turned 40 I looked forward and realised that if I were to live my dream of traveling, it would have to be in the decade that followed especially since the places that I wanted to visit were remote and the travel would be hard on the body.

And so once my mind was made up, the universe and the God of probability partnered me and arranged to bring people and opportunities into my life to make this dream come true.

In Rajasthan with a Bhopa & his family

In Aizawl, Mizoram

In Odisha with Dongria Kondh tribal girls

In Kutch, with Rabari women checking out the Rabari necklace that I was wearing

In Changthang with Pashmina-Goat-Herder Nomad woman & her baby

Dhrng Mela 2007

The start of the Nomadic life!

Today a few years later I am rich. I had a dream, I made plans and was fortunate that probability & destiny were not just kind but very very generous and bestowed great wealth upon me. The wealth of living my dreams, the wealth of experiences that, without travel, would have remained inaccessible to an urban resident, the wealth of knowing worlds beyond my own, the wealth of being exposed to a diverse spectrum of  life-models. And as a result, my mind & my spirit have been freed from shackles of being contained within one paradigm, one life, one way of thinking. My spirit is a nomad – unrestricted & free. And that freedom is my wealth. The experiences are my wealth. The people I connected with along the journey are my wealth.

Am blessed. And grateful. And I am RICH!

jm

April 2014